


Field Notes from the Glass Closet

by Crowbrain



Category: Original Work
Genre: AFAB, Coming Out, Feels, Gen, Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Transphobia, Nonbinary, Nonfiction, Parent-Child Relationship, Transgender, Transphobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-15
Updated: 2020-01-15
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:49:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22269694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crowbrain/pseuds/Crowbrain
Kudos: 4





	Field Notes from the Glass Closet

I don’t know how long it would take me to get the things off my chest that I ought to get off of my chest. The things you should know but never slowed down enough to listen to, or the things I was too afraid to say. Am too afraid to say. I wonder how much me being truly myself would change how we talk. I wonder if my own apprehension- of what you’d say, whether or not you’d yell or kick me out or transform into a mass of teeth and eyes and rip me apart at the seams to start over- has made things go the way they have. Fear is a binding. Fear is the thing that sneaks knifelike between ribs, that seizes the brain that existed before thoughts did, and sets the heart for running. 

I came out to you the first time on a walk. By bittercold water, sand and shale worn smooth. Anywhere to sit still cast in the pall of thunderstorm remnants. We sat anyway. It was spring. My confession spilled strange, like the aftermath of Babel; words wobbling, new truths curling through the leaf litter like pale green things. And you heard and you did not understand.

The quiet in the now is killing me I think. There are no elephants, only sleeping herds of moose with long, sharp antlers. When they wake, when the storm brewing now breaks, I know what happens. The portents are in, the oracles have drank their last cup of tea. The house will be left in ruin, every fragile thing broken, the screams ringing in the ears of the neighbors, throats bloody with the force of our own shouts. I know, I know. The band has played this song before on different instruments. 

Love is fragile. Love is as tenuous as spiderwebs or ants or baby birds. Why is it so painful and yet so easy to fall out of love? When I was born, or after I was born were there times you had to convince yourself you loved me? Me with my neediness and my soft head and my ever present wailing. I remember you yelling when I was little, but old enough to remember. 

Where is the line to be crossed? If love is conditional, then what are the conditions that render me unloveable? 

Have I already met them?

The quiet in the now is killing me I think. Lobsters are functionally immortal, they die by suffocation when their shells are too thick to split. Every day I am little farther than from where I wish I could be. Every day, it feels like the shell gets thicker. A little harder to escape. I wanted to transition by now. Caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly. All my flight feathers grown in. Felling stitches to the new seams. The cut of the fabric changes the shape of the finished piece. I’ve never been good at cutting out patterns as they need to be. 

The elastic bites into the underside of my ribs some days. The way you say my name some days feels like being hemmed. _she , she, she_ like the _snick_ of shears, or the _shk_ of razors. Like being the way I am, who I am is too much. Like if you call me the name you have always called me, I will return to being new and small. Like all the truths you find unpleasant about me will grow back their gills and return to the depths they came from. 

If they do, I go with them. If you put me under the water now, I would drown.

Fear is in the binding. The tightening of the lungs, the racing of thoughts that run like horses for a distant horizon unreachable. They tell you not to wear a binder while exercising, or for more than 8 hours. So you don’t puncture a lung, get pneumonia. I wonder if I did, that winter I started. The winter I came out again. I spent a week not being able to breath without rattling, lungs so full of mucus it felt like drowning, assigned gender of the week ‘death warmed over’. You sent me to school anyway. 

My body fits me ill some days.

Many days.

Most days. 

It fits like a gift from a grandmother. Overlarge and lumpy. Too tight in some places, too loose in others. Given without regard for preference, in a style you would never wear given a choice. Worn out of obligation. The world obligates me to this body. Obligated to wear makeup to interviews, obligated to sweetness, to the chirping voice I never grew out of, to small pockets, to white dresses I will never wear again, to babies I never want to have, to a name you gave me when I was smaller than my cat is now. 

Obligation tightens noose-like on my bad days. The days where I am a moth in a bottle, where I am armature covered in the kind of modeling clay that leaves residue on hands. The days when I swim in my body, where my fingertips are miles away and dissolving. Unraveling. The days I feel least like myself, least like my own. 

I know you see the distance I have. And you ask what’s wrong, if you ask what’s wrong. And I have no choice but to say:

“Nothing.” 

Or “I had a rough day at work.” 

Or “I had a rough day at school.” 

Or “I have a week before my period, could we please stop for olives and chocolate.”

A thousand inanities for the truth I wish I could say

I came out to you the second time in my therapist's office. Poorly planned, poorly executed, poorly received. Air stale, walls collapsing like an earthquake hitting. I told you my plans and portents with the fragile hope that you would know. That I could be myself, unrestrained. I thought you would like that I would keep my initials the same. 

I have come out again and again to people after you. 

To the first that knew and understood why I could never be his princess, in an alleyway. In a patch of grass and rubble, a dead bird that my eyes focused on when I could not meet his. In the moment, so terrified that the Conversation would be the last we ever had. So desperate to not lose this flicker of new and good and right. We cried together. 

And he told me that he loved me. Tells me that he loves me- every morning, every afternoon, every night, every time neither of us knows what to say. And that has been with me, every time after. When I have come out to the friends I have known since before I can remember, friends I have known for hours at most, cousins, teachers- the counterbalance to the fear that you created. Every acceptance, even stumbling and unsure, leaving me a tad lighter.

Love is fragile. We have flighty hearts, so scared, so scared of being hurt again. Of the sharp words, of the jokes made at the expense of the selves we keep hidden. Every rat-trap, every dose of herbicide. But still we grow, in the cracks of the cement. We build our nests on the spikes meant to keep us from building nests. Love, given time, will tear down mountains. 

The neon lights of the future seem far away now. Fuzzy and uncertain and unattainable as a heat mirage. So much that has to be put in order. There are flowers waiting under the desert sand. Patient, encapsulated color, waiting to burst into a riot when the rain finally comes, laying waste to the wastes. I carry my anger in my pockets often, small and cold. The days pass like water, wearing over the sharp edges. Eternity turns rocks under water to perfect roundness. Smooth and cool, the marble and soapstone I filled your pockets with at three-five-seven. 

I wonder how long I’ll have to wait. How long before my name reads right on all the fiddly bits of paper that label me as me? The collection of properly packaged identity. The need for binding removed. No more trading breath for freedom of expression. No weight pulling down and forward. No more aching back and hips. Centered. Every pattern piece aligned, arranged, tailored to the design the inscrutable factory of my body could not reproduce in minutiae. 

One day I will move away. And when I come back I will be different. 

I will be at peace with myself. I will be myself loudly in the middle of the day. I will be myself in a way you cannot bonsai into shape. I will be called by my name in all quarters, the one you gave me packed in the attic alongside my old artworks. 

Love is fragile. Love is tenuous. Love must be kept alive by the steady work of hands. Love is the garden growing. An absence of weeds means there is barely enough to keep the plants alive. 


End file.
